Ready to cook?

Have your tools ready. Photo by Brittany Silverstein (CC-BY).

Welcome to the Newscoop 4 Cookbook! Newscoop is an open content management system for professional journalists. Designed by newsroom experts, it powers professional newspapers and magazines worldwide. It meets the demands of modern journalism with intuitive interfaces, flexible publishing, multilinguality, geolocation tools, and social media integration. The powerful template engine of Newscoop allows you to create any text formats from your database - HTML, XML, Javascript, you name it. This makes it very attractive for contemporary web developers, because it goes beyond "making HTML" and is by nature HTML5 ready. You can find out more about Newscoop 4 at http://newscoop.sourcefabric.org

Like every good cookbook, this book has lots of good recipes, ideas and tips for creating online publications with good taste, and which taste good too. And, like every good cook, there are a few utensils and ingredients you should have in your kitchen and ready to go. This manual will provide you with enough advice and code examples to get a high-quality publication up and running with Newscoop.

The Newscoop 4 Cookbook will walk you through all the stages of creating an online publication. We start at the planning stage, because in our experience at Sourcefabric, careful planning helps avoid future obstacles. Then we walk through the design process, into the stage of converting the design into templates. The following chapters guide you from the essential need-to-know, to the advanced, and finally more exotic ways of using Newscoop for your publication.

You can get going quickly by using one of the sample themes from the Sourcefabric website. It's possible to adjust these pre-made themes to your needs. In the longer term, spending time to understand the possibilities of Newscoop will help you to create a unique publication that stands out from the crowd. It also allows time to reflect on the organic processes unique to each news organization, and therefore to each Newscoop deployment.

Where to go for information, help and services

We have more documentation on Newscoop. There is a manual aimed at journalists and editors, a wiki based reference guide, and more. You can access these resources at: http://manuals.sourcefabric.org

There are support and developer forums provided by Sourcefabric. Meet the Newscoop teams, ask for help and offer support if you know the answers. These forums can also be followed via e-mail. http://forum.sourcefabric.org/